4

Peter stood facing the blustering stream of the shower, sluicing the loose soapy drifts from his body. The pounding water drummed hot against his chest; he turned back and forth beneath it, letting it slide him clean. Finished, he turned off the water and stepped out of the tiled stall. The chrome shower head was old, and pitted with dark flecks. The lopsided stream did not stop at once but subsided noisily into a narrow uneven thread before it dripped to a finish.

Peter stood on the bath mat. It lay, rumpled, directly on the tiled floor; there was no rug. There were no curtains at the window, no pictures on the walls. Only Peter’s shaving things, on the shelf above the sink, announced his presence in this place. He pulled his towel from the rack and set his foot on the edge of the bathtub. Leaning down to dry his leg, Peter lost his reflection in the mirror.

Most of the time he remembered why he was here. Much of the time it felt normal to him, understood. But sometimes, waking up, or on the phone, caught off guard, he forgot, and found himself suddenly in an alien place. Now, naked, bent over, balancing on one foot, he was lost, in this small bare room with its split and yellow tiles. The walls were thick with white paint, and faint cracks wandered across them. The whole apartment was like this: handsome, in decline.

Peter rubbed his towel across his toes, the rounded knob of his ankle, feeling the abrasive cloth against his damp skin. Caroline came into his mind; she did often. Her image was indistinct, her outline hazy. He could no longer exactly remember her face: he held the sense of it, what it was like to look at it, but he could not conjure up the individual features, the whole.

She was no longer his wife. His marriage was over. Each time he thought that phrase, that word—over—something in him lowered, mourned. He had not meant this to happen. He had believed that his marriage lay before him, a vast, unknown, fertile territory stretching out ahead. It was there, he had believed, to be explored, mapped, to be understood, slowly, over the course of his life. He had abandoned the expedition. How had he done it? How had he managed to become divorced? But he had made it happen; he had insisted. He thought of Caroline, and at the thought of returning to her, taking up his life with her again, he felt his heart snap closed. No; he would do it again, he would leave.

These feelings were continual and befuddling, like simultaneous existence in two separate universes: grief at the loss of his marriage, grim determination to end it. He saw again Amanda’s face as she stood by the elevator. He saw Caroline in the bedroom, weeping, enraged.

Peter stood upright and set his other foot on the bathtub. He dried the other leg, the sharp edge of his shin, barely submerged beneath the shifting surface of the skin, the long solid slope of his calf.

He could see Caroline’s contorted face, her clenched fingers. That day she had screamed at him, and cursed; it was not the first time. Angry, impatient, contemptuous: this had been more and more how he had seen her. It was strange: the first thing that had struck him about Caroline was her good humor.

He had first seen her on the beach. It was early summer, the end of his first year at law school. Peter had spent the weekend with a classmate, in Nonquitt. They had taken a picnic to a nearby private beach with the wonderful name of Barney’s Joy. They parked, and walked staggering through the heavy white sand, laden with towels, sandwiches, beer. As he remembered it, the smooth wide beach was endless. A flat shingle stretching out forever, rising on one side into high swooping dunes. It seemed no one was there that day except their group, exuberant, alone in that radiant, limitless vista. (Though how would he know, he thought. In your memory, your table is the only one at the restaurant.)

The day was bright but chilly, windy. Caroline wore a sweater over her bathing suit. A big hat, Peter remembered, dark sunglasses. He couldn’t really see her face, concealed by the wide straw brim, the dark glamorous lenses. Still, he had a sense of her: smiling, charming. Beautiful. She acted beautiful. Then someone, pouring from a thermos, spilled on her sweater. Caroline whooped and jumped up. Her arms and body were loosely muffled by the sweater, her long legs beautifully bare. She capered on the sand, dancing at the shock of the liquid—was it hot or cold? She was excited, hilarious. She had squealed, but with delight, it seemed, anyway without temper. Peter had been struck at how little she minded; she brushed at the stain on her sweater, then began to laugh. He could see her face now. The wind struggled with the wide brim of her hat. Strands of long streaked blond hair blew across her mouth, and she drew them away with her fingers.

Peter scrubbed the towel at his thighs, his buttocks, his back. He moved more slowly, now that most of him was dry. He put the towel over his face, enclosing himself in its damp rough darkness. He molded hard his own features, rubbing deeply into the sockets of his eyes, scouring with his toweled fingers, as though he could scrape off some late, undesirable layer, and return himself to some earlier phase. It was over, he thought. Again, at that word, he felt cast out onto a dark turbulent place. Where was he? What had he done with his life? A part of him, his lost marriage, ached, like a severed limb, still sentient.

When Peter had met Caroline he was not yet ready to marry, not looking for a wife. He had a plan, linear, orderly: after law school he’d move to New York, find a job. He would settle these things before he took on marriage. A wife should be looked after; she was a responsibility. He wasn’t ready for that. In those days, what drew and held him fixed, an invisible beam commanding the landscape, was fear about money.

At night, on the edge of sleep, Peter was visited by a scene from a nightmare. He watched from outside, mute, paralyzed, while his parents, trusting, unworldly, settled slowly and unwittingly into an inexorable slide toward poverty. He saw the pair of them, sitting comfortably before the fireplace; he saw the house begin, perilously, to tilt, the floor buckling in horrible silence, the foundations giving way, the mossy shingled roof caving in. The image came often, quickening his heart with anxiety.

But that day at Barney’s Joy, watching Caroline caper on the white sand, with her smooth long legs, her hat, he found himself thinking of the word companion. It startled him. It wasn’t what he thought he wanted in a wife, a woman. What a good companion was the sentence that came to him.

Now, in the small bathroom, Peter remembered his frantic anxiety about money. He could not call the feeling up again, it was like remembered pain. Now what he felt was different. He had achieved what he had wanted—security—and the things Caroline wanted: the apartment on Park Avenue, the clubs, the private school, the nanny. Now he knew what he could do, the achievement itself was not so frightening. He felt like a horse in harness, setting his shoulder against a load he knew he could pull.

Peter was a partner in his law firm, which was midtown, midsized. He had specialized in intellectual property, at a time when few people were interested in it. Now, with the rise of the electronics industry, intellectual property was hot. Young associates crowded around him like young bullocks, eager but wary, jockeying for attention. His division had expanded. His parents would elude the poorhouse.

Peter toweled his chest and stomach, liking the abrasive drag against his skin. He was dry, clean, ready for his dinner with Emma. The glowing point at the end of his day. He stuffed the towel onto the rack, where it hung in damp crumpled folds. At home, at the place he still thought of as home, the towel would be folded neatly the next time he saw it. The next time he saw this towel it would look exactly the same: drooping, slatternly. Right, he thought.

In his bedroom Peter was surrounded by familiar objects. Here they were, companions in his flight, his exile, his liberation: the worn red Persian carpet from his library, its fringe uneven and fraying. Here was his leather wing chair, his grandfather’s mahogany bureau, ponderous and gleaming. The polished wood was dark reddish brown, its fine grain like a weather map, full of drifting swirls, deep subtle currents. The top drawer bellied boldly outward, then back in again, like a half-round column laid horizontally across the chest. Below, the other drawers were soberly perpendicular, starred with a double line of crystal pulls.

Caroline had been glad to get rid of the bureau. She had called it “the Victorian horror.” Peter could not tell, himself, what it looked like. To him the chest was not a piece of design but a piece of his family. It spoke to him of his grandfather. Peter had never known his grandfather, but the bureau had been in Peter’s bedroom as long as he could remember. In the early mornings, when Peter lay barely awake, he looked through half-closed, slowly blinking lids, and imagined that he saw his grandfather as a boy. He wore those strange stiff clothes, the high restraining white collar, the rusty black knee-length trousers. In the dim light he stood motionless, looking into an open drawer. He never turned; Peter saw him only from behind. His shadowy imagined presence was benign, comforting.

Peter’s parents still lived in Marblehead, in the house where he had grown up. It had originally been the carriage house on Peter’s great-grandparents’ place. All the buildings on the property had been remodeled. The laundry, the stables, the carriage house were all cottages now, occupied by cousins, aunts, uncles. The big house, Axminster, was the only one unchanged. It belonged to Peter’s uncle, also a lawyer, and the only one who could afford to keep it up.

Axminster was dark and massive. Outside, it was unpainted shingle, with small-paned windows and huddles of narrow chimneys, in the Arts and Crafts style. Inside, the rooms were high ceilinged, spacious and gloomy, with vast shining oak floors and somber wood paneling. In the living and dining rooms there were enormous rustic fireplaces made of granite. The majestic staircase rose to a half landing before continuing to the second floor. The banisters were not columns but thin flat panels, with heart silhouettes carved out of them. There had been a springer spaniel named Caesar who used to sit on the landing and stick his muzzle out through a heart-shaped cutout. Peter could not now remember if he had ever known Caesar, or only heard of him, but he could see him clearly, sitting on the landing, the small brown snout protruding, the stumpy tail trembling.

When Peter had brought Caroline home to meet his parents, she’d made much of the carriage house. “Oh, it’s charming,” she said, over and over. “I just love it.” She was effusive, Southern.

The carriage house was also dark inside, with high wainscoting and ceilings that were, literally, lofty. Some of the floors were narrow wooden boards and some flagstone, varnished but uneven. The house had a rustic aura, a subtle leaning toward its past. You felt there might be a chain cross-tie hanging against some wall, ready still to clip onto a brass halter ring, or in some corner a nest of worn winter horseshoes, ready to be reset with the ringing blows of the blacksmith’s hammer. The Chatfields occupied the house lightly. Things were as they were, it didn’t occur to them to make changes.

That day, Peter took Caroline for a walk after lunch. It was late fall, and the afternoon darkened early. They walked across the mossy lawn, crunchy with early frost. Ducking around a shrubby wall of forsythia, they met the flat gravel drive of the main house. They followed the drive around the curve to face the great dark facade and heavy porte cochere of Axminster.

Caroline’s eyes enlarged. “Whose house is this?” she asked.

“Uncle Punch and Aunt Judy,” Peter said.

“Punch and Judy?” Caroline repeated.

“Her name’s Sarah, but everyone calls her Judy because of Uncle Punch.”

“And his name is really Punch?”

“Hubert.”

There was a pause. Caroline said, “God, it’s huge.”

Peter grinned and put his arm around her. “Too bad,” he said. “You picked the wrong cousin.”

Caroline smiled winningly and shook her head. “Don’t be silly,” she said, but Peter could see she was disappointed. At the time it had amused him.

Peter’s family had been in Boston since the early eighteenth century. They had been comfortable, though not rich, until the late nineteenth century, when someone had turned fortunate in the textile industry. Axminster was the name of a successful carpet. But by the time Peter was born, most of the money had trickled away, at least in his own family. Like his father, Peter had gone to St. Paul’s and Harvard, but unlike his father, he had gone on scholarship.

Now Peter pulled on clean boxer shorts, snapping the waist, feeling the silky ironed cotton against his damp skin. The luxury of being clean, he thought, cool stuff against your skin. Emma came into his mind, her creamy skin. Her smooth arms. Her hands, the narrow, flexible fingers, like a lemur’s, some kind of clinging prehensile creature. Her pointed chin, so neat and precise, elfish. He loved her narrow greenish eyes, bright, slanted beautifully downward, in an elegiac droop. When she smiled they narrowed, turned radiant.

Peter opened a drawer of folded shirts in plastic-fronted envelopes. He chose deep blue, with narrow white stripes, and shook out its stiff folds, sliding his arms into the sleeves.

On the bureau, on the white linen scarf, were his things: his grandfather’s pair of worn ivory hairbrushes; a silver tumbler which had been an usher’s present at his roommate’s wedding; his leather wallet—limp, dark, packed. There was also a little silver dish, its provenance now forgotten, where he kept his change. A dizzy-looking small clay bowl, unglazed, leaned hard to the left. Amanda had made this in first grade and given it to him for Christmas. Peter kept his cuff links in it.

He slipped the links through the holes in the heavy French cuffs. The links had been a present from his father; they too had belonged to Peter’s grandfather. They were small brass ovals, engraved with his grandfather’s initials: PSC. The surface was worn and nicked, the engraving now blurred at the edges. His grandfather’s name was Paul, not Peter, but the initials were the same. Peter was an only child, and he would inherit all the family objects, no matter what the initials. By the time his parents died, that would be all there was left: the furniture and the house. His father spent capital every year, not lavishly, but steadily.

Peter would have to sell the house. The family would be outraged if he sold to outsiders, and trying to sell it inside would become a nightmare of negotiations, recriminations, sullen silences, furious letters sent by hand, family members cut dead in the street. All these things had happened when his grandmother died and the property was distributed. One uncle had moved to Santa Barbara in a rage and had never spoken to Punch again.

Peter could not keep the carriage house. He would never find himself settled in Marblehead again, his life would not take him there. He had never talked to his parents about this, about his selling the house. Peter was forty. His mother was seventy-two, his father seventy-five. His parents were both still healthy, forcefully alive.

At this moment, nearly seven o’clock, his parents would be in the kitchen. Peter’s father, Jeffrey, was a pediatrician, semiretired. He had stopped working altogether on weekends, and cut back during the week. Right now he would be sitting in the rocking chair at the end of the kitchen table. In one hand would be his sole drink of the evening, Scotch and water. In the other hand would be the newspaper. He bought the paper on his way home from work, and read it at night. He was always one day behind on the news. While his wife cooked dinner he would sit beneath the standing lamp, reading out loud to her things that amused or incensed him.

Peter’s father was tall and thin, balding. He wore rimless glasses over his bright blue eyes. His cheeks were deeply lined, with long furrows, and there were tufts of wild white hair in his ears. In the winter he wore a hand-knit wool vest, and heavy tweed suits that never wore out. In the summer he wore ancient linen suits, glossy with ironing, and blue sneakers. At all times Dr. Chatfield carried an old pair of metal binoculars, dark, weighty, serious, suspended from a fraying leather strap around his neck. He was an intent and dedicated birder, and would pull over to out side of any road in order to lift and focus his binoculars. His life list was lengthy and impressive.

Polly, Peter’s mother, would be moving from sink to counter to stove. She wore tweed skirts and solid-color sweaters. She dressed in dull colors, browns, grays, slate blues. She was small and comfortable, with a large sloping bosom and no waist. There was a short perpendicular crease between her hazel eyes, and small flattened pouches beneath them. Her hair was bright white, short and straight, parted on one side. She made brief replies to her husband’s announcements.

When Peter told his parents that he and Caroline were separating, his mother raised her eyebrows and said nothing.

Dr. Chatfield rocked silently, thinking, looking at Peter over his rimless glasses. His mouth was puckered into angry folds.

“What did you expect?” he asked finally, the chair creaking.

Peter felt a spasm of anger himself. He waited for a moment before he answered. “I made a mistake,” he said. “Caroline and I want very different lives.”

“Everyone does,” said his father rebukingly.

Peter did not answer, and after a while Dr. Chatfield opened his newspaper, his mouth still pursed, his eyes narrowed.

Peter, sitting across from his father, took a swallow of his own drink in the silence. He leaned his head against the stiff high-backed wooden chair, feeling its perpendicular clasp. He understood he had disappointed his parents, but why did they ask him nothing more? He resented their silent judgment. He had received no credit for his efforts to make the marriage work, no credit for any of his successes, not even the material success that was for them, too. It was never discussed again.

Afterward, often, he wondered what his father had meant. If there was an unrevealed passage in his parents’ lives, Peter didn’t ask about it, didn’t want to know it. Its presence loomed outside his vision, hidden, like a black reef known only by white surf above it, too dangerous to approach. Everyone does. The phrase did not leave him.

Now half-dressed, his shirt buttoned and linked, his legs bare, Peter pulled on his socks. They were cashmere. Again he felt a deep sense of luxury, of gratitude to the world. Cashmere socks. It had not been until boarding school that he had realized how odd and idiosyncratic his family was. He had assumed that everyone could find their family name in public places: graveyards, lists on church walls, libraries. He took this for granted, though with a certain sense of entitled pride. It was not until boarding school that he realized, to his surprise and shame, that his family was poor.

The winter he was an awkward, testy seventeen-year-old, he had sat in the kitchen one night before dinner. His father was reading the paper.

“Why can’t we go to Vail for spring vacation?” Peter asked, challenging, clumsy.

Dr. Chatfield raised his eyes from the paper. “Do what?”

“Why can’t we go skiing in Vail?” Peter asked again, at once irritated by his father’s response.

The Chatfields had always skied. The family had, for decades, owned a farmhouse near Mad River. Everyone had used it—aunts, uncles, cousins—according to increasingly complicated rules of occupancy. But the house was old, and the arrangements had become impossibly snarled and entangled, and when Peter was twelve, it had finally been sold. Since then Peter had only gone skiing when he was invited by friends.

“In Vail?” his father repeated. “Vail, Colorado?”

Peter nodded defensively.

“Why not? Because we can’t afford it,” Dr. Chatfield said, staring at Peter with an air of bemused alarm, as though his son had suddenly leapt on top of the table. There was a long silence, during which Peter seethed resentfully. When Dr. Chatfield felt his point had been made, he returned to his newspaper.

“Besides,” Peter’s mother said reasonably from the sink, “we don’t know anyone who goes to Vail.”

“Well, I do,” Peter said.

“We’re still not going,” Dr. Chatfield said, behind the paper.

Peter pushed back his chair, stomped out of the room.

It had been at Harvard where Peter discovered how truly poor he was. Freshman year, his roommate was a rich Argentinian. Roberto’s talk of estancias, shooting parties, weekends at beach houses, balls, dances, private planes, silenced Peter. He watched Roberto’s treatment of things: Roberto dropped a cashmere blazer on the floor, and left it there for five and a half weeks. Peter owned only one blazer, and it was wool. During reading period, in January, Peter finally picked up the dusty abandoned blazer and hung it on the back of a chair. Roberto said cheerfully, “Don’t bother with that. It’s so filthy I’m going to throw it away.”

Peter stared at him for a moment. He thought of the blazer thrown into the scrap basket in their room, he thought of it out in the big trash basket on the landing. He thought of himself, sneaking it out of the trash basket. Furious at the idea, at his own imagination, he settled the blazer’s shoulders on the back of the chair.

“It’s just dusty,” he said coldly. Roberto shrugged. Later the blazer vanished: Peter supposed Roberto had thrown it out after all. Roberto paid no attention to his possessions. He lost his lustrous custom-made shirts, his lamb’s-wool sweaters. He wore his wing-tip Peal loafers without socks, roughly stuffing his heels into them until he broke down the backs. Then he threw them away. Peter watched this without comment.

At home, Peter noticed for the first time the frayed edges of his father’s blue broadcloth shirts. He noticed the tired, unrenewed quality of everything in the house: his mother’s tattered plastic address book, the faded sofa pillows, the ragged Persian rugs. It enraged him; he blamed his father for all of this. There had been money; now it was gone.

Peter put on his suit, smoothing his shirttail down inside the trousers. His suits were made for him. Not in London, he thought that was something you should inherit. His grandfather had had an English tailor, but no one knew its name. Finding a London tailor on your own, Peter thought, was like making up a family coat of arms. He went instead to Morty Sills, on Fifty-third Street. Sills’s was small and snobbish, like a private club. Caroline had been delighted when he told her he was going to Sills’s. Her face had lit up, as though Peter had achieved something substantive, instead of merely deciding to spend a lot of money on clothes.

Caroline had seen New York, as he had, as a place in which to excel, though their goals were different. She was aiming at social triumph. She was from Louisville—Loouhville, he had learned to pronounce it. Her family was large, with money in the background. There were cousins, houses, parties. Caroline’s mother, Mrs. Pierce, was glamorous and bossy, tall and thin, with a long corded neck. She had short rough bronzed hair, brushed up and back, with furrows as though a harrow had combed it. She wore gold jewelry that looked like braided rope, and was flirtatious with Peter. “Petah,” she would call, patting the sofa next to her, “you come ovah heah and sit down and tell me who’s going to be the next president of the United States.” She was flattering, charming. Caroline was afraid of her.

One evening Peter and Caroline came downstairs for drinks before dinner in the Pierces’ big red living room. In her mother’s house, Caroline spent hours dressing, painstakingly doing her hair, her makeup. That night she was wearing new earrings. She had bought them in New York and shown them to Peter. “My mother will love these,” she had said, exultant. He had realized that even in New York she dressed for her mother’s eye. Coming down with her that night, he had felt Caroline’s eagerness, her excitement.

There were guests, and the bright room was scattered with people. Mrs. Pierce stood in front of the fireplace, white pants, a bright red sweater, gold earrings. She was at the center of a group. Caroline, in a silvery top and black pants, her hair smooth, her patent-leather slippers gleaming, paused for a moment at the top of the two broad steps that led down into the living room. Smiling, she went down to greet her mother.

Mrs. Pierce turned, stared at her and said loudly, “Caroline, whatever possessed you to buy those earrings? They look like little bits of intestines wrapped in tinfoil.” Everyone laughed, and Mrs. Pierce turned back to her friends, smiling. “I loathe the earrings you see today. I wish Fulco were still alive. Do you remember him? Oh, his things were so much fun.”

Caroline, next to Peter, stood still. She touched her earrings and smiled, as the others laughed at them. Peter saw that her eyes were glittering. She said something indistinct, then turned as though she’d forgotten something. She trotted back up the two steps that led to the hall, then turned toward the dining room. Peter, following, pushed through the swinging door to the butler’s pantry. He found her leaning on the counter, crying, enraged. “I hate her,” she said furiously when he came in. “I hate her.” She put her hands over her face. Peter put his arms around her, and she wept against him.

When they went back to the living room, Mrs. Pierce was effusively friendly to Peter. She put him at her right for dinner.

Peter turned now to the mirror, sliding his tie around the neck of his shirt. The collar stood stiffly upright. That moment, when Caroline had collapsed against him, weeping, bruised, he had felt swept by tenderness, the wish to protect her. She had seemed vulnerable, he had felt strong. All this had risen up in him, urgent, turbulent. A kind of love; he had thought it the real one.

He knotted the tie, looping the flat panel of silk around itself. Odd that you have to look in a mirror to do this, he thought, even if you know how. Even if you know the mechanics precisely, you need the eye. He watched the loop, the slipknot, the silk tails fitting neatly one underneath the other, one just the right amount shorter than the other. He remembered learning to tie nautical knots, sitting inside on rainy summer days in Maine. The rabbit comes out of the hole, around the tree, back into the ground. He was ready; he buttoned his jacket. He looked up and met his own eyes in the mirror: now, Emma.

For an instant her face came to him: brilliant, radiant against deep space. Then it dissolved, and he had to blink, mentally, and turn his mind away before he tried again.

He remembered the first time he had met her, at the cocktail party. He had thought her cool, then, self-sufficient: now he knew she was shy, self-conscious. As she looked at his paintings, he had thought her judgmental and dismissive. Now he knew she was most ruthlessly judgmental toward herself. She forgave herself nothing, permitted herself no errors: it was absurd, touching.

He felt himself yearning for her. It was so different, this kind of love. How could he have mistaken the other for it? He longed for Emma’s presence, the pleasure, the luxurious solace of it. He thought of the long line of the inside of her arm, the pale untouched skin.

This part was like charging headlong down a mountainside, heedless of footing, balance, boulders, gravity, feeling only the necessity of the rush. Who knew what would happen? Who cared? How good that he was in the middle of it, in the middle of this hurtle, the thundering landslide of himself, toward her.